Агентство Crayons отмечает 40-летие: переход к работе с данными и рост на индийском рынке

Mumbai: Kunal Lalani, Managing Director, The Crayons Network, still remembers the version of the business he started 40 years ago. “It was not the way it is today,” he says. “More to do with physical meetings, there was no technology, nothing. The whole process was very different.” As Crayons marks the 40-year-milestone this year, that time is really the story. The clearest break, he says, is data. “The 80s to now, 2025-26, it's all data driven.” The structure of the business changed along with it. Full-service agencies that once did everything for a client have splintered into specialisations. “In the first 10-15 years when we started, we were technically always an extension of the marketing arm of the client, that was the real role we played,” Lalani says. “Today, the client has enough in-house capability that they use you only for your specialisation.” The real economics of being independent Crayons has stayed outside the network system through all of this and Lalani treats that as a deliberate trade-off, not an accident. “There's a thrill in working on our own, in not being accountable to any global network or format,” he says. “That helps us be agile, and lets us tackle situations very differently from the MNCs.” Most of the agency's clients are owner-run Indian businesses or public sector: “we're not even 10% MNC clients.” Independence survived Crayons’ 2023 listing too, which Lalani frames as a discipline upgrade rather than a loss of control. “By going public we wanted to bring in a lot more professionalism and responsibility. It gives us institutional strength. We've become a company that's now governed by shareholders, their expectations and guidelines, so you get much more discipline to run it as a business,” Lalani tells BestMediaInfo. The IPO was oversubscribed by 150 times. While going public doesn't insulate an agency from the market's mood swings it brings in other perks. “The stock market isn't something anyone controls,” he says. “Mr. Trump alone can come and destroy everybody.” However, the listing gave Crayons the opportunity to bring in more capital while keeping their creative and operational autonomy. According to Lalani, the difference between being answerable to stakeholders and a parent agency network is that the former helps them retain their creativity and operational standards without any day to day disturbance. The current ins and outs of the agency business Retainers are the clearest casualty of the moment. “The retainer model is under severe pressure,” Lalani says, and project-based work has become the default way new relationships start, because it protects both sides from an ambiguity retainers create. Lalani explains that in retainers BAUs can fluctuate, sometimes making it difficult to quantify just how much work is done by the AoR. Even so, he doesn't think one model replaces the other, “we need to mix and match between both (retainer and project based models).” Government clients, meanwhile, have become one of the better-paying corners of the industry. Working with government clients demands patience, Lalani concedes, “the government process is a bit slow,” and teams handling these clients “need a little more soft handling.” But “they're better paymasters today,” he says. “They pay you for what they think your work is worth,” a contrast to the fee pressure on the private-sector side. Even the multinational networks have caught on, “every multinational today is pitching for government business, Ogilvy, WPP, Leo Burnett, everybody's there.” Then there's AI. “AI is a reality, there's no doubt about it,” Lalani says, calling it “an enabler” rather than a threat, one that mainly punishes people who don't upskill. His sharpest worry is craft, not jobs - too much early AI-assisted work happens because “people aren't using their brains, they're just doing standard copy-paste.” Lalani however, expects the market to self-correct, “it'll be visible to anyone... that this isn't a genuine effort.” The road ahead For a sense of the distance travelled, Lalani reaches back nearly 35 years, to a paan masala launch that first put Crayons on the map. “We broke the clutter, or rather we broke the whole barrier, and brought in Vinod Khanna, the superstar of that time,” he says. “Even today, people recognise Crayons from there.” But if he were to start the agency business today, would he do all of it again in 2026? That candour cuts both ways. “That's a tough one. I don't know if I would start Crayons now,” he says, pointing to what the job has lost along the way, “that glamour and thrill has gone out of the business... today,” But that doesn’t change the fact that the road ahead for Crayons is a thrilling one. “I can assure you the best years for India are yet to come,” Lalani quips. “India is rightly placed for super growth in the next five years. We're being recognised now, because we've grown to that size and scale,” with Crayons aiming to be in “the formidable top three or four markets in the world” within the next five years.